Here Is How All the World's Airports Are Connected

The world has certainly gotten smaller thanks to commercial air travel, and a new data visualization map created by Martin Grandjean can help us better understand the complicated web of air traffic around the globe.

Martin Grandjean

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Grandjean plotted 3,200 airports and 60,000 flight routes on a map, and general patterns of human movement around the world are immediately visible. But it's not until you elevate the clusters of airports above their host countries and start spreading them out according to air traffic that you can really see the difference in shape between natural geography and the network of travel we've built to get around it.

Martin Grandjean

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The most striking area on the map is Europe, where a relatively small region contains more airports than anywhere else in the world. India, meanwhile, is more connected to the Middle East than it is to East Asia, and the air traffic across the Southern Hemisphere is dwarfed by the traffic in the north.

As Grandjean writes, "Ultimately, these maps (sometimes very beautiful objects), do not represent the data itself, but some idea of the complexity and quantity." In this case, it's a map that represents the practical shape of our modern world.